1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to content delivery over the Internet and, more specifically, to a dynamic content assembly mechanism that enable a content provider to cache, distribute and assemble individual content fragments on the edge of the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Several years ago, the Web was seen by many companies mainly as a new way to publish corporate information. As these companies' Web sites grew, the problem of managing an increasing amount of dynamic content on these sites grew exponentially, and the first content management applications emerged. Application servers were also developed to handle all application operations between Web servers and a company's back-end business applications, legacy systems and databases. Because these applications could not process HTTP requests and generate HTML, the application server worked as a translator, allowing, for example, a customer with a browser to search an online retailer's database for pricing information. Application servers and content management systems now occupy a large chunk of computing territory (often referred to as middleware) between database servers and the end users. This is illustrated in FIG. 1. There are many reasons for having an intermediate layer in this connection—among other things, a desire to decrease the size and complexity of client programs, the need to cache and control the data flow for better performance, and a requirement to provide security for both data and user traffic. Also, an application server bridges the gap between network protocols (HTTP, FTP, etc.) and legacy systems, and it pulls together separate data/content sets, presenting them atomically to the end user.
Businesses that rely on the Internet to streamline their operations face the challenge of providing increased access to their back-end systems, preferably through Web-based applications that are accessible by customers, suppliers and partners. The business processes that must come together to drive this new generation of online applications, however, are more complex than ever before. Far from the HTML and static pages of years past, the new breed of applications depends on hundreds, if not thousands of data sources. The content involved now feeds dynamic, personalized Web-based applications.
Delivering personalized content, however, is not new. Many Web destinations, mainly portal sites, use personalization to create a unique user experience. The look and feel and content of such a site are determined by an individual's preferences, geographic location, gender, and the like. By nature, these sites rely heavily on application servers and/or content management systems and the use of well-known techniques (such as cookies) to create this dynamic and personalized user experience. The majority of pages on these sites, however, are considered non-cacheable and, as a consequence, content distribution of such pages from the edge of the Internet has not been practical.
Consider the example of an online retailer for electronic products. When a user accesses the site and searches for, say, Handhelds, that request is sent to the application server. The application server performs a database query and assembles the page based on the return values and other common page components, such as navigation menu, logos and advertisement. The user then receives the assembled page containing product images, product descriptions, and advertising. This is illustrated in FIG. 2. The next time the user (or another user) access that page, the same steps need to happen, which introduces unnecessary latency in delivery of the content to the end user. On occasion, the page might be cached within the application server's internal cache, in which case the request would still have to be satisfied from the origin server, requiring a full round-trip from browser to origin server and back and requiring additional computational processes on the application server, necessitating more CPU and memory usage.
It would be highly desirable to be able to cache the dynamic page closer to requesting end users. As is well known, content delivery networks (CDNs) have the capability of caching frequently requested content closer to end users in servers located near the “edge” of the Internet. CDNs provide users with fast and reliable delivery of Web content, streaming media, and software applications across the Internet. Users requesting popular Web content may well have those requests served from a location much closer to them (e.g., a CDN content server located in a local network provider's data center), rather than from much farther away at the original Web server. By serving content requests from a server much closer electronically to the user, a quality CDN can reduce the likelihood of overloaded Web servers and Internet delays.
Returning back to the example, assume that the content provider assigned the dynamic page a Time To Live (TTL) of one (1) day, for example, because there are only infrequent changes to the inventory for Handhelds. The first time a user requests the page it is assembled by the application server as described in FIG. 2. Because the page has a TTL of one day, it would be highly desirable to be able to store the page on the CDN edge servers for that time period, so that all subsequent requests for that page could be served from a server closer to other requesting end users who might want similar information. This is illustrated in FIG. 3. This cached version preferably would include those product images and description that are common components and generally do not vary from user to user. Even though the page was originally assembled for an individual user, it would be desirable to be able to cache given fragments themselves so that the building blocks of the page can be shared between users.
The dynamic content assembly mechanism of the present invention provides this functionality.